Langston Hughes Mulatto: Southern Modernism

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Mulatto: Southern Modernism Langston Hughes is considered a Modernist writer because of his work, however one of Hughes’ works is Southern Gothic. Mulatto is a play about a white plantation owner, his black housewife, and their four biracial children. Cora, her son Robert, and Colonel Norwood are the main characters. Robert’s sisters can pass for white, but he cannot. Robert wants to be equal to his father even when his father disowns him. Elements of Southern Gothic literature include a southern setting, grotesque attributes, decay, violence, and often times racial issues. Mulatto has most of the aspects of, and therefore making it, a Southern Gothic work. The South is known for its hospitality, kindness, and its ability to ignore the odd …show more content…

Throughout the entire play people refer to Cora as the “black woman” they talked about how she should not be living in the big house with Norwood, and how he should marry another white woman (Hughes 1623). Norwood also plans on making Robert pick cotton for the rest of his life. Racial controversy in the South was a monumental part of the culture and Southern Gothic literature. In the South during this time African Americans were not slaves, but they were still treated badly. Robert telling Norwood he was a white man and would act like one upset Norwood to the point he almost killed …show more content…

In The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois explains the color line perfectly in “Of the Coming of John.” He demonstrates how two boys who grew up together could end up with different out comes based on the color of their skin. In Mulatto Robert discovers the same thing, and he cannot see why he should be treated any different than his father. Southern Gothic literature and Modernism are split the same way, and because a writer writes about the country South or the city in the North they are placed in certain categories. Writers who write the same matters need one big category. Modernism covers all the aspects of Southern Gothic literature one category covers it

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